This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Small apartment buildings are virtually impossible to build in much of Toronto. What are we afraid of?

In a weekly series the Star seeks simple, affordable solutions to the problems faced by Torontonians and the city as a whole.

The problem: In a city with increasingly unaffordable housing options, some neighbourhoods are overwhelmed by highrise construction, while others are losing vitality because of depopulation.

You want neighbourhood character? Welcome to urban, upscale, professional, dignified Palmerston Blvd. There are stately decorative stone gates at the Bloor St. intersection. There are classic custom lampposts, more than a century old, made of black iron topped by white globes. Mature trees line the sidewalk and create a canopy arch over much of the road. You are steps from the Bloor West strip and the subway, a few more steps from Little Italy on College, good schools, lots of restaurant options, parks big and small nearby, and streetcars a couple of blocks away. Big old brick Edwardian single-family homes that have high ceilings and four or five or six bedrooms line both sides of the street — little mansions, some of them, that sell for well over $2 million — with big front porches where people can sit and watch their neighbours stroll past.

And what’s this at No. 534 Palmerston Blvd.? A little four-storey walk-up apartment building, looking as stately as the rest of the street. It is brown brick with bay windows on either side of central porch-style balconies over the front door, white-framed dormers rising out of the black sloped roof. There’s a well-maintained lawn out in front on either side of the walk. The building occupies a lot that appears roughly the same size as the house lots of its neighbours — as does its twin, attached on the south side. But where most of the other houses are home to a single family (or, in some cases where the houses have been divided into flats, two or three families), the buildings at 532 and 524 contain, according to the entrance code listings, at least 25 households.

Standing here, admiring the street and the buildings that seamlessly fit into it, I wonder: is this what we’re so afraid of? Is this the type of building Toronto’s government and shouty public-meeting residents fear is going to destroy the “character” of their neighbourhoods, overwhelm the livability of their streets, corrupt their family atmosphere with itinerant leaseholders?

Because I have to say, this gorgeous old building — like the other similar old walk-ups down the block — fits right into the character of the neighbourhood. It enhances that character. In this case, it was a part of establishing that character.

Yet this kind of building (110 years old, in this case) is nearly impossible to build in Toronto today. I wrote recently about the new Toronto anthology House Divided edited by Alex Bozikovic, Cheryll Case, John Lorinc and Annabel Vaughan, which outlines how and to what extent the city has forbidden the construction of little lowrise apartment buildings and triplexes (and even townhouses) in most of the city’s residential neighbourhoods.

The book argues, through a series of essays, that this kind of building could be part of the solution to Toronto’s affordability crisis.

YOU MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN...

I think we ought to put one or two of these buildings on every single block in the city. And that doing so could help address not just affordability without overwhelming infrastructure, but make neighbourhoods better places to live, with more lively commercial districts, better parks and schools and more diverse populations.

Share your thoughts

This is the first in a series of articles in the Star that will run over the next several weeks on How to Fix Toronto. Our reporters have talked to experts and thinkers and come up with suggestions to address problems in transit, housing, the impenetrable bureaucracy of city hall and the gaps in our response to an overdose crisis, among other topics. Today, following up on my recent reading of House Divided, I present my own idea to give the authors’ suggestions some teeth, by mandating the construction of hundreds of lowrise apartment buildings all over Toronto, and then building them as public housing where the private sector won’t.

The thing about buildings like the one on Palmerston Blvd. is that they are perfect neighbourhood-scale structures. Unlike highrises and even midrises, they don’t overwhelm the rest of a street or block with their size, or with the size of the populations they house. But unlike single family homes, they offer a permanent rental housing option, more places for people to live, and smaller units for students, single people or couples, and seniors. They also subtly but importantly add population density — an important factor in a city where many of our most established neighbourhoods have actually been losing population for decades, which hollows out demand for public services and the walk-in customer base of neighbourhood commercial strips.

They’ve been illegal (or nearly so) to build in residential areas of Toronto for a couple of generations, yet you can find them here and there. And when you do — as with the ones on Palmerston — you have to wonder why anyone would oppose them. They seem like great places to live, and great additions to their streets and neighbourhoods.

YOU MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN...

These are some of the most desirable streets and neighbourhoods in Toronto. In none of these cases has the presence of these long-standing buildings destroyed character, or dragged down property values, or created traffic chaos, or any of the other things people claim to fear apartment buildings will do to their residential streets. In each case, it seems to me, they only add to the character and desirability of their settings.

As I wrote before, I think every street in Toronto could use one. Or two.

So here’s an idea: start by changing zoning and other laws so that anyone can build such an apartment building (say, up to four storeys and six to 12 units) as-of-right — with no special hearings or anything beyond a normal building permit required, unless there are already more than two on the same block. Waive the normal development fees. Then go further and mandate that each residential block of each street in the city (assuming it has more than, say, 15 total lots on it) will have at least one on it by the end of the next 20 years or so. For the first five years, see how many private developers and existing landowners get together to start building them — there would be a lot of money to be made on these relatively low-cost, high-yield rental buildings. Then, identify the streets where no such buildings exist or are under construction, and get started buying or expropriating lots to fill in the gaps by building them as social housing — perhaps as completely subsidized buildings, or maybe as mixed market and rent-geared-to-income units.

The first part, on its own, would start to address affordability through increased supply. The second part — a likely massive expansion (albeit at modest scale) of social housing all over the city — recognizes that supply on its own won’t help the working class and those living in poverty, and would follow the lead of a city like Vienna which continually expands its stock of social housing (as the introduction to House Divided notes, more than two-thirds of Vienna residents live in subsidized housing). In Toronto right now 102,000 households are on the wait-list for social housing.

Get more opinion in your inbox

Get the latest from your favourite Star columnists with our Opinion newsletter.

These smaller buildings are much quicker and cheaper to build than highrise apartment towers. The economies of scale that would result from a boom in the development of these buildings (standard frames could be prefabricated in factories, for instance) to bring down the cost. The demand for labour to build them would create jobs. And for the social housing component, the city could get creative with the financing on a large scale as it has with Regent Park and other sites, using the profit from market units and buildings to fund the social housing.

How likely is the city to do something like this? Given the history of how they’ve approached NIMBYism (accommodating it at every turn) and the general disinterest in doing anything that might scare existing homeowners, I’d guess not very.

And a lot of those NIMBYs would rise up to oppose it, shouting about character the whole time. It’s too bad, and part of why most of them will never get to live on a street with as much character as Palmerston Blvd.

But we could give them all, and the city, that gift of more — and better and more interesting — places to live. And we should: it would help to fix so many problems in Toronto at once.

More Opinion

Top Stories

More from The Star & Partners

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com